Round-up

I've had these two articles in the queue for a few weeks now. The fact that I still remember them, even after all the Christmas/New Year hullabaloo is a testimony to their quality.

"The Future of History" (Francis Fukuyma, Foreign Affairs):
(Great, great reflections on "outlining an ideology of the future"--an ideology that thinks beyond capitalism and leaves welfare liberalism in the dust. It's long though; the meat is in the last two sections. ***The free version of the article is only available until 2/12/12***)

. . . .Politically, the new ideology would need to reassert the supremacy of democratic politics over economics and legitimate anew government as an expression of the public interest. But the agenda it put forward to protect middle-class life could not simply rely on the existing mechanisms of the welfare state. The ideology would need to somehow redesign the public sector, freeing it from its dependence on existing stakeholders and using new, technology-empowered approaches to delivering services. It would have to argue forthrightly for more redistribution and present a realistic route to ending interest groups’ domination of politics. 

Economically, the ideology could not begin with a denunciation of capitalism as such, as if old-fashioned socialism were still a viable alternative. It is more the variety of capitalism that is at stake and the degree to which governments should help societies adjust to change. Globalization need be seen not as an inexorable fact of life but rather as a challenge and an opportunity that must be carefully controlled politically. The new ideology would not see markets as an end in themselves; instead, it would value global trade and investment to the extent that they contributed to a flourishing middle class, not just to greater aggregate national wealth.

"Do the Classic Have a Future?" (Mary Beard, New York Review of Books):
(Think this is just another whingy piece about the decline of the humanities? Think again. And read on. I was so pleasantly surprised.)

The truth is that the classics are by definition in decline; even in what we now call the “Renaissance,” the humanists were not celebrating the “rebirth” of the classics; rather like Harrison’s “trackers,” they were for the most part engaged in a desperate last-ditch attempt to save the fleeting and fragile traces of the classics from oblivion. There has been no generation since at least the second century AD that has imagined that it was fostering the classical tradition better than its predecessors. But there is of course an up-side here. The sense of imminent loss, the perennial fear that we might just be on the verge of losing the classics entirely, is one very important thing that gives them—whether in professional study or creative reengagement—the energy and edginess that I think they still have.